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XTool – Cross-platform Xcode replacement
- flax 1y agoWould this theoretically allow a Flutter app developer to build and deploy an ios app from Linux? God, I hope so.
- candiddevmike 1y agoIt technically violates the Apple Developer Agreement AFAIK, but that seems like yet another lawsuit waiting to happen IMO.
- ronsor 1y agoApple won't do anything right now as they're certainly afraid the courts* will slap them hard. *Both US and EU now
- saagarjha 1y agoThey’re still rejecting Fortnite so I don’t think they’re particularly scared of anything
- jchw 1y agoEpic Games sure is proving to be a formidable opponent, but they might be getting a little optimistic with thinking that Fortnite will be allowed to return to the App Store; after all, while they have been squabbling over App Store policies, I don't think any of the rulings imply that Apple still can't keep specific titles banned from the App Store at their discretion. In that particular case I kinda feel like Apple might be right to not be afraid, at least not right now. (P.S.: Personally, I initially thought Epic Games was stupid for flagrantly violating the ToS on purpose. Was that really needed to actually file the lawsuit? I dunno; I'm no expert. But it looked stupid. It looks a lot less stupid now, but it still kinda looks like a tactical mistake.) Maybe they needn't be afraid here either, but from a risk perspective it does seem like causing a stink here may not be their best move. They're still going to aggressively try to railroad people into developing on Mac; there's no iPhone Simulator on Windows or Linux after all.
- yard2010 1y agoIMHO it's a matter of principle, showing the bully he has limited power no matter how big his muscles are.
- chuckadams 1y agoIn Epic's case it's just another bully who wants a piece of the first bully's turf.
- tough 1y agoGoliath vs Goliath
- solarkraft 1y agoEpic Games may do some despicable things too (this is about micro-transactions after all), but (as a software developer) in this fight I still find it reasonable to root for their side - them winning improves the world for a lot of us.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- _blk 1y agoYeah weird world. When Gates bundles IE that no one wants it's an abuse of power but when Jobs shoves his apples down your throat just to (try to) publish for their platform it's all OK.. Oh, or was that the lawsuit waiting to happen? ;)
- freeamz 1y agoSame thing with the bank bail out, if Bush did oh my we will never hear end of it, but if cool president who smokes weed and get down some good music, then no one really call him out on it.
- tgma 1y agoIIRC it is only a potential issue if the host machine isn't made by Apple. You can install Linux on a Mac and use this. IANAL yada yada.
- petabyt 1y agoPeople have been doing hackintoshes and macos VMs for years... And apple hasn't really done anything. So I doubt this tool will provoke them.
- conception 1y agoApple has killed the Hackintosh…. It’s just bleeding out still.
- ofrzeta 1y agoHow so? Seems like Hackintosh got kind of obsolete with Apple Silicon.
- cyberax 1y agoYou can't install XCode on non-Apple devices. Or use iMessage.
- johnisgood 1y agoIs this the case? How does that work? Genuinely curious. I remember I had macOS (Mac OS X, actually) on my PC. My last Hackintosh was Mac OS X Leopard. Everything seemed to work well... back then. I even had XCode working.
- zImPatrick 1y agoyou can still install xcode - and also still use imessage if you configure your vm correctly, see kholia/OSX-KVM
- cyberax 1y agoI tried that, and I can't make it work. Sigh.
- cosmic_cheese 1y agoiMessage can be made to work with a hackintosh. You just have to go the whole way in making your hackintosh fully Mac-like with a fake but plausible/realistic serial number and expected network setup. You can’t stop at just getting macOS installed and booting. I’ve had multiple installs in the past where it worked fine.
- nar001 1y agoDoes it? You still need to install Xcode for the iOS SDK, so they're not really doing anything wrong?
- notpushkin 1y agoI believe it allows usage on “Apple-branded computers”, so building iOS apps with xtool on Asahi is probably legit. But yeah, I would probably use this for testing only, and do actual releases from macOS proper.
- Cloudef 1y agoAfaik its already possible with darling. Nixpkgs also has xcbuild replacement, but not sure if it can handle codesigning.
- gman83 1y agoJust use something like CodeMagic, I wouldn't risk getting your Apple account banned.
- loic-sharma 1y agoThis project helps but isn’t enough alone: 1. Dart can’t cross-compile from Linux to iOS yet. You could use Dart’s interpreter instead, but that’d significantly regress performance. 2. Flutter iOS projects use the Xcode project format, you’d need to migrate that to xtool’s project format 3. Flutter hasn’t finished migrating its plugin ecosystem from CocoaPods to SwiftPM - any plugin that hasn’t migrated to SwiftPM yet likely won’t work with xtool.
- woleium 1y agono android support?
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- landr0id 1y ago...this is for building apps targeting iOS and macOS on non-macOS platforms. Why would Android support be necessary?
- zh3 1y agoAlso https://forums.swift.org/t/xtool-cross-platform-xcode-replacement-build-ios-apps-on-linux-and-more/79803 https://forums.swift.org/t/xtool-cross-platform-xcode-replac... (and HN discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43952239 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43952239).
- lwouis 1y agoThis tool says "Xcode replacement" and "Xcode-free development". I thought there is no way they can build apps without Xcode. How would they replicate the libraries, compilers, etc. I dug more and of course they don't: "Though we don’t rely on the Xcode build system, you still need to install Xcode for the iOS SDK and toolchain" I think they should clarify their messaging. This is not a replacement or an alternative. It's a layer on top designed for what they think is a better experience.
- rockbruno 1y agoI think you are mixing some different concepts here. It's not that this is a layer on top of Xcode/xcodebuild, it's just that Apple today happens to package everything iOS/Swift-related together with Xcode releases. So even if you couldn't care less about the Xcode IDE itself or the xcodebuild build system, you still need to have it because this is the only way for you to download / install those toolchains. Apple could provide these separately, but they just don't.
- notpushkin 1y agoWould it be possible to get just the SDK from the Xcode package? Like Asahi installer streams only the relevant parts of macOS images from Apple’s servers.
- isodev 1y agoThere are some components that may be downloadable separately but they really are part of Xcode. One ring to rule them all.
- kabiroberai 1y agoI looked into streaming but afaict the XIP format doesn’t support random access the same way that ZIP does. specifically because 1) it doesn’t seem to have a Central Directory like ZIP and 2) it has an optimization where files can be hardlinks to other files (by ID) in the XIP, so if you want to extract a file but all you get is a hardlink ID, you can’t expand the contents until you encounter and expand the hardlink pointee. it’s possible I’ve missed something, open to ideas for sure.
- firecall 1y agoJetBrains used to develop AppCode: AppCode A smart IDE for iOS/macOS development AppCode is no longer available as a commercial product as of December 14, 2022. https://www.jetbrains.com/objc/
- lwouis 1y agoIt seems that Fleet will support building XCode apps. It looks like a big regression from AppCode. As of today Fleet doesn't compile my macOS app. I try regularly on new updates. No alternatives, unfortunately
- sandebert 1y agoWhat's Fleet?
- tomcam 1y agohttps://www.jetbrains.com/fleet/ https://www.jetbrains.com/fleet/
- Larrikin 1y agoFleet will also most likely get abandoned as people who pay for an IDE highly prefer the older one and people who want VSCode use VSCode I also think any revival of AppCode is also dead as JetBrains is all in on Kotlin everywhere. iOS multiplatform support hit stable recently.
- BrandonSmith 1y agoJetBrains already announced it is no longer targeting Fleet as its iOS strategy for Kotlin Multiplatform. Instead it will be realizing its strategy through IntelliJ IDEA and Android Studio.
- mdaniel 1y agoIt likely doesn't help the ObjC part of that story, but they moved the Swift part out into a CLion plugin https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/8240-swift https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/8240-swift Regrettably I didn't see that they did anything with the ObjC part, choosing to /dev/null it
- pjmlp 1y agoMore likely a command line xcodebuild replacement.
- walterbell 1y agoEarlier, "Build iOS Apps on Linux and Windows", https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43952239 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43952239
- waynecochran 1y agoThe screenshot has a vscode icon?
- bdcravens 1y agoYes, because the tool itself is just a command line app, replacing the build tools, but not the IDE. You edit the code in your tool of choice.
- awinter-py 1y agoxcode, the tool that takes 9 hours to download every few months and makes random edits to my XML and plist files? that xcode?
- bdcravens 1y agoI see the Github org is "xtool-org". I wonder if XTool the company (makes laser engravers and other creative/crafting tech) will take issue.
- jasau 1y agoWould be cool to have similar tooling (de-attached from XCode) for live previewing interfaces built with Swift UI.
- novoreorx 1y agoReminds me of Sweetpad (https://sweetpad.hyzyla.dev/ https://sweetpad.hyzyla.dev/), which is a bit tedious to setup, XTool seems to provide a better DX, huge wish for this project to grow!
- novoreorx 1y agoAlso it shares something in common with XcodeGen (https://github.com/yonaskolb/XcodeGen https://github.com/yonaskolb/XcodeGen), especially on using a yaml format to define the project's information